I was searching for something else, and I came across this piece I wrote back in 2007…

…And perhaps unsurprisingly, not much has changed today, except that now catastrophists are saying EVERYTHING is proof of climate change.

Climate change can apparently do anything whatsoever, including mutually exclusive and contradictory things, because “science”.

It’s absolutely unfalsifiable.

I decide to republish it here, to point out, that while the science against the catastrophists has only accumulated and strengthened; their stridency and grasping demands have only increased.

…

I say again, the concept of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change, except in the case of localized micro-climates, holds absolutely no scientific water.

Honest scientists will tell you the same thing if pressed (and if their funding doesn’t depend on it), but the agenda politics of todays science (admittedly on both sides of the political spectrum, but generally on different subjects), prevents real, honest, science from occurring anymore; or from being reported if and when it is (the record of suppressing science which disproves catastrophic anthropogenic climate change is long and shameless at this point).

The mere language used by catastrophists against those who seek to use actual science rather than sociopolitical ideological faith, calling us “deniers” in an attempt to paint an equivalence with holocaust deniers, should make it clear that their concern is not truth.

The honest numbers are simple.

Global temperatures have risen an average of less than 1 degree centigrade since measurements started being taken (“adjusted measurements”, which have been conclusively proven to be inaccurate and possibly deliberately manipulated say it may be as much as 1.8 degrees, but that is the absolute maximum).

There is no “sudden and precipitous increase”. There is no hockey stick. It was a lie, and even many of the climate change people have admitted it. The ice caps aren’t melting, in fact in most areas they are thickening slightly. The sea level isn’t rising any more than it would have naturally.

Oh and in case you didn’t know… Polar bears are excellent swimmers.

More damning to the catastrophists faith; even by their own admission, there has been NO rise (and there may in fact have been a slight decline) in global average temperatures, SINCE 1996.

Since temperature recordings have begun, volcanic eruptions have put more carbon into the atmosphere, and caused more temperature change, than all of human industry and activity since the beginning of the human race; but it wasn’t by increasing temperatures with carbon, it was by decreasing them with dust in the air… much of which was in fact carbon particulates.

The world has been far colder than today at times when there was far more carbon in the atmosphere; even without more dust. The world has been far warmer than today with far less carbon in the air, even WITH more dust.

The amount of anthropogenic carbon dioxide and carbon particulates in the atmosphere are FAR less than one half of one percent of total carbon dioxide, and far less than one half of one percent of total carbon particulates (the vast majority of CO2 is released by soil, rotting vegetation, oceanic microorganisms, and seafloor offgassing. The vast majority of particulates, are released by forest fires, and volcanic activity ). Considering how small a percentage of our atmospheric carbon and carbon compounds (between 0.03 and 0.06 percent. Not between 3% and 6%, 3 one hundredths of a percent), that amount is completely insignificant to global climate change.

This is not to say they don’t effect local microclimates, they certainly do. But in those local microclimates, these concentrations are literally hundreds to thousands of times higher.

These levels of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere are not a temperature driver, or a climate forcing.

In fact, historical records show that overall CO2 levels (which, remember, human inputs make up only a tiny fraction of) TRAIL global climate change by anywhere from a few hundred years, to a few thousand.

All currently existing GLOBAL climate change can be fully and scientifically explained by natural endothermic cycles (atmospheric oceanic interaction combined with volcanic and other geothermal activity, and large particulate emissions such as forest fires, plus natural greenhouse component and other climate forcing component emissions), and the fluctuation in output of the sun (because earth is an exothermic system). The suns output has varied greatly over the course of human history (and of course long before), and periods of warming and cooling have tracked right along with that output.

Models using average sunspot activity as an indicator of solar thermal forcing, have proven to be accurate within a few percentage points at predicting historical temperatures.

Some models (those used by catastrophists) predict that there may be FUTURE global climate change based on a theory that human generated carbon inputs, even though they are far lower than historical levels which did NOT cause these things to happen, will somehow cause the entire climate system to change the way it has always functioned.

These models are ridiculous on their face. The way you test a model is to run if forwards and backwards without adjustment, and see if it can accurately predict what actually happened in the past, using the data from further back in the past; then verifying against actual future results over time.

None of the models that predict significant global climate change due to human carbon inputs, come anywhere close to predicting the historical record.

They always consistently overestimate warming by SEVERAL HUNDRED PERCENT, as in estimating 4 to 8 times the actual warming.

And NONE of them came anywhere close to predicting the variability of the historical record, always showing a consistent warming trend over time, even for CENTURIES that had a significant cooling trend.

The models were not made to predict the actual climate… they were specifically made to predict massive warming, no matter the input. And that’s what they do, as non-catastrophists have proven, running data which any rational model should predict steady or cooling temperatures through the models… and they STILL predicted significant warming.

I leave it up to you to decide whether the models were just designed badly, or whether the distortion was intentional. Either way, these models cannot be trusted, and decisions should certainly not be made based on them.

The climate IS changing, and has since the moment the earth formed a climate. As near as we can tell (through ice core samples and the like) there has never been a period of more than 200 years without at least a 1 degree change in global average temperatures.

The climate will continue to change on its own, and no NORMAL human activity will change global climate significantly one way or the other… unless it’s something that actually would kill us all (which would by definition not be normal… Incredibly massive particulate pollution over a high percentage of the earths surface – including the oceans – would do it. It would initially trigger warming from trapped thermal radiation, followed by extremely rapid cooling from blocking out the sun, and then a sudden ice age; and likely kill all crops and food animals in the process, along with at least 80% of humanity in the first two years, if not more, and ultimately followed by mass global extinction).

That isn’t to say we shouldn’t attempt to develop better sources of energy, we should. We aren’t going to “run out” of oil… ever in fact; a basic understanding of economics would show that. But, eventually hydrocarbon fuels are going to get more and more expensive as time goes on, and petroleum fueled combustion engines are relatively inefficient, and do contribute significantly to micro climate pollution.

In many ways, doing things greener IS in fact better. Saving energy is generally a very good thing. Not polluting is generally a good thing. When it isn’t, is when it destroys economies, prevents job growth, reduces food production, increases food prices, and all the other ways that forced greenism (I won’t even call it environmentalism, because it isn’t doing the environment much good), causes pain, suffering, misery, and general reductions in peoples health, quality of life, standard of living, and basic liberties.

“Climate change” isn’t about the environment… It’s about giving financial and political control to anti-western, anti-capitalists…. Or just the cynical opportunists who would use peoples good intentions and fears to increase their own power.

It’s about punishing those rich capitalist nations and people, for not being poor socialists… Or just for “not doing things the RIGHT way”…. whatever that particular person or group happens to think the “right” way is.

It isn’t science, it’s a pseudo-scientific sociopolitical ideological movement, and near religion. The adherents don’t need any proof, because they have faith; and any who challenge that faith must be burned as heretics in their new inquisition.

Basically what that means, is that I believe, all things being equal, responsible adults should be able to do whatever the hell they want to do, so long as nobody’s getting hurt, who isn’t paying extra

Conservatives do not believe that the government can “create” jobs directly. This canard of the left does nothing but destroy market-driven, sustainable jobs at the expense of increasing the national debt and attaching an anchor to GDP growth in exchange for short term government employment and expanded private sector government influence. That doesn’t mean that a conservative Congress can’t stand for job creation. The way we get there is by providing the modern infrastructure, economic freedom, and competitive tax code that attract, rather than repel the world’s wealth. We want to decrease the cost of doing business here at home and focus government resources on business-supportive roles, rather than coercive ‘partnerships’. It begins with a smarter tax code.

A) Pass Corporate Tax Reform (dare Obama to veto)

I don’t recommend settling for half-measures here and I recommend putting this near the top of the agenda for 2015. Obama has, on multiple occasions, put Corporate tax reform in his state of the union address in his 6 years in office (five addresses, 4 mentions). Corporate tax reform that accomplishes the closing of certain loopholes, the ending of certain forms of corporate welfare, and the reduction of rates to something that competes with the rest of the developed world has broad, bipartisan support among the voting middle class. In Washington, such measures have met with stiff resistance from corporate lobbies who do not want to see the corporate tax base broadened to include them, specifically (through the removal of loopholes). Let the GOP stand for the voters, not for special interests, and pass comprehensive corporate tax reform that does the following:

• Cuts the corporate tax rate to 25% at most
• Creates a two-tiered capital gains tax bracket, where all capital gains are taxed at a much lower rate below $250,000 each year
• Excises many of the tax-sheltering loopholes used by the biggest corporations to avoid paying; in particular, the shelters to profits earned overseas by American companies
• Gives corporations a ‘tax holiday’ to repatriate foreign capital until January of 2021
• Creates a lower corporate tax rate for wealth generated by manufacturing concerns – 15%, perhaps

There are, I’m certain, other great ideas that could be included in a sweeping change like this, and we’re all ears. This is just a start. The goal is to create an environment that encourages businesses to take risks and expand their workforce here at home without taking the punitive approach championed by Obama (penalize companies that keep their money overseas, rather than improve the economic climate at home).

B) Pass the REINS Act (obtain Obama’s veto)

REINS is a relatively simple piece of legislation passed in the GOP-controlled house and left to gather dust in Harry Reid’s file cabinet. It requires congress to approve all regulations in excess of $100M as scored by the Congressional Budget Office each year. If said regulations cannot be approved, they are immediately stricken. This is good policy on so many levels, not the least of which is that it maintains the separation of the non-political government agencies from the political process in the drafting of public policy regulations but forces Congress to exercise some oversight on those regulations that are particularly costly. We recognize that regulatory science should not be trapped by the political process, but we also believe that unelected agencies should not have carte blanche to pass regulatory rules without oversight that serve as a huge burden to economic growth. It will give the voters some ability to hold their representatives responsible for the regulatory state and encourage those who draft said regulations to minimize their costs or garner broad public support for their necessity. It will also make public the CBO scoring of the cost of every major regulation, helping the public to get a sense for the true costs and benefits of each.

C) Return the Full-Time Workweek to 40 Hours

We’ll talk more about the Affordable Care Act when we get to healthcare, but one of the most pernicious things the ACA accomplished was to effectively reduce the American workweek to 30 hours in the eyes of the law. Democrats supported this concept to avoid the tendency of corporations to get 39 hours of work per week out of employees to avoid having them counted as full time and thus be forced to offer benefits. The problem, of course, is that reducing the workweek to 30 hours meant a lot of people just got cut down to 29 hours. If you’re a struggling poor or working class American, this tends to drive you to take two part time jobs and you end up working more and still not getting benefits, or working drastically less and not making enough money to survive. If all else fails, regarding the ACA, increasing the workweek back to 40 hours at least offers some relief for people in this situation (and the CBO projects a big surge in part time labor under the ACA as it currently stands).

D) Expand the Earned-Income Tax Credit

Right now, if you earn less than $11,000 for an individual or $88,000 for a family filing jointly, and are legally eligible for that work, you can claim an earned-income tax credit (variable by family size and earnings). The EITC is good policy for the poor and working classes and should be expanded with increased credit sizes (perhaps another 30-40% proportionally) and availability (up to incomes of less than $125,000 for a family filing jointly). Make this revenue neutral by creating a “super-wealthy” tax bracket (>$1,000,000) that is taxed at a slightly higher rate and by eliminating eligibility for certain tax credits for people in this new upper tax bracket. Normally, the GOP is not associated with eve the smallest of tax increases for the wealthy, but if we reduce corporate taxes as previously outlined, this sort of minor compromise will come out in the wash while selling as good, fair tax policy to middle class voters.

E) Exempt Small and Moderate-sized Businesses from Burdensome Regulation

Small business start-ups are responsible for the majority of new jobs that pay above the media household income. They’re also in sharp decline here in the US. One of the major reasons for this is that, when Congress enacts legislation to regulate business, it does so with larger businesses in mind. We recognize that it is indeed necessary to regulate larger corporations, because they can have disproportional impacts on the environment, the free market, and the welfare of the people. We also recognize that big business can absorb the cost of our most aggressive regulations, but small business cannot. We also believe it is unreasonable for small businesses, frequently run by citizens without the resources to educate themselves on the full extent of the regulatory state cannot be expected to comply to the same degree as larger corporations, and that their likely impact on people, the market or the economy is greatly reduced. We, therefore, must pass a law stating that regulations determined to be of great impact by the CBO as in the REINS act, should be applied only to corporations with greater than 250 employees or more than a negotiable amount of total assets.

F) Repeal Sarbanes-Oxley and Replace with Common Sense Reporting

Again on the subject of over-regulation, this panic-move following Enron’s collapse is among the worst offenders for needless corporate regulatory burden, annually costing billions in the private sector for compliance and producing no change in accounting transparency. It reminds us of the mindless and often pointless busywork we used to get in school, and compliance requires companies to hire a fleet of folks who are specifically experts in the labyrinthine letter of this law. It must go and be replaced by much simpler-to-follow guidelines for financial reporting.

The latest estimate by industry sources is that Keystone XL pipeline would create in excess of 20,000 good paying jobs immediately and have extensive multiply impacts on the job market, not to mention making it cheaper to move oil to high-demand parts of the country where oil prices are currently far too high. Our best environmental impact studies conclude that the XL pipeline would be a net positive for the environment if you assume that the alternative is transport by rail, rather than non-use. This is a no-brainer.

As the science improves to reduce waste products from nuclear fission power, and as the EU and Japan continue to move ahead of us on safe, clean nuclear energy, our ability to innovate and, perhaps, solve the problem of excessive fossil fuel emission is stymied by the anti-science left’s crusade against Nuclear Energy. It’s time to stop being parochial and superstitious in the face of overwhelming evidence that nuclear energy is, by far, our best source of affordable, clean energy.

I) Abolish the Export/Import Bank

It may not be immediately apparent how ending this brand of corporate welfare can help create jobs, but it becomes clearer when you realize that many of the businesses that benefit from Ex/Im assistance are the non-dynamic, struggling corporations not likely to hire a large labor force, and it always seems to come at the expense of healthy competition. Again, the key to job creation is a competitive, free market that rewards well-run companies, not the ones out begging for federal dollars to stay afloat and squash upstarts.

Whisky making requires three ingredients: water, yeast, and a grain. However, only 10 percent of those products end up as whisky, the remaining 90 percent is wasted during distilling. These waste products are either released into the sea or turned into animal feed.
Celtic Renewables Ltd is a start-up company in Scotland that is working to reuse the waste products from the Scottish Malt Whisky industry to develop biobutanol – an advanced biofuel that can be used instead of fossil-derived fuel. This will in turn reduce oil consumption and CO2 emissions, and provide an energy guarantee for rural areas that have a booming whisky industry.
The team have refined an old industrial fermentation technique, and managed to change draff (husk residue left by fermented grains) and pot ale (liquid produced during the mashing process), into 1-butanol and ethanol – which can both be used as fuel.

According to About Autos, the advantages of biobutanol over ethanol is that it has a higher energy content than ethanol. Biobutanol can be blended with gasoline at higher percentages and doesn’t need a separate distribution network, unlike ethanol. Finally, unlike ethanol, biobutanol is not corrosive.

However, the major disadvantage of biobutanol over ethanol is that ethanol has a much larger production capacity and has been the beneficiary of subsidies all over the world. Hopefully this company can change that and this technology can be adapted to other whisky producing areas of the world such as Canada and the United States.

I’m one of the original co-founders of The Liberty Papers all the way back in 2005. Since then, I wound up doing this blogging thing professionally. Now I’m running the site now. You can find my other work at The Hayride.com and Rare. You can also find me over at the R Street Institute.

As we run up to the midterm elections, the drumbeat is once again sounding throughout that land, that Republicans… or rather, everyone not Leftist… are “anti-science”, “pro-ignorance” etc… etc…

I am constantly hearing some variant of “Republicans are either evil or stupid for not… X”.

The sad part of course, is that a certain percentage of non-leftists, including libertarians and conservatives are in fact, nuts, particularly about science… and another large block are ignorant.

Of course, so are large blocks of those on the left… but that’s not what we’re talking about right now.

There are certainly many scientific issues over which the ideological spectrum split, but likely the biggest one, with the most uniform split (there’s very few whose ideological “side” don’t match the position staked out by that side, to some degree or another)….

“Climate Change”

Ok, talked about it here before, and there’s plenty of great resources on the topic (try Climate Skeptic for a start)… But it’s an issue among my friends right now, and Neil Degrasse Tyson has been talking about it lately (before his most recent brouhaha), facebook is… well, pretty much always covered with it etc…

Let me just lay things out for a bit…

First, YES, there ARE loonies out there who say that there is no climate change “because Jesus” or “It’s all a conspiracy man” etc… etc… etc…

Feel free to ignore them, as you would on every other subject. They don’t represent any kind of reality based universe, never mind a rational position.

There are also those who simply say that there is no such thing as climate change whatsoever… But mostly they are either ignorant of, or don’t understand, the science, math, or historical record in question

And yes, there are far more of those than there should be in 2014.

However, some of us come to our positions through a knowledge of science, engineering, math, the scientific method, research methodologies and data analysis.

There are those, myself among them, who actually DO understand science, and don’t believe in CATASTROPHIC, ANTHROPOGENIC, global warming, leading to systemic, catastrophic climate change.

We are not irrational, ignorant, evil, driven by unsavory motives, or stupid.

We come to this position, because we understand that:

The question isn’t whether climate is changing and will change in the future, it always has and always will. The question is how much has it, how much will it in the future, and why.

Catastrophic, anthropogenic, global warming leading to catastrophic climate change, is a tightly interconnected theory. For any element of the conclusions to be correct, ALL of the suppositions within the theory must be correct. The instant any of them changes, at all, the theory falls apart.

The mathematical models for this have always been highly speculative and have proven non predictive both forward and backward.

The data is greatly variable ( and often poor) in quality, and is adjusted in ways that make it less than useful for a model with high sensitivity predictions, because small changes or inconsistencies in the data make big changes in the model.

The catastrophic model adopted by the U.N. has some major dependencies which are entirely theoretical, and have not been borne out by historical facts; specifically estimates of forcing, estimates of weighting of various factors, and particularly estimates of extremely high sensitivity to certain factors (especially CO2), that while throughout all of history have exhibited one behavior (a stable, negative feedback system), for some reason (i.e. humanity is bad and stuff), things have changed now… even though CO2 has been much higher in the past, and it didn’t happen then… Such that a very small change in CO2 will have a large multiplier effect, transforming the stable negative feedback system that the climate has been throughout the entirety of history to this point, to an unstable positive feedback system.

There is no evidence for this catastrophic theory, nor does it correspond with historical models, or models that prove to be historically predictive (i.e. if you run the model backwards and forwards in time, it matches roughly with what actually happened).

This prediction has been made since the mid 80s (prior to the mid 80, from the early 70s they were predicting global cooling and ice age by the way), and the models have proven to be grossly inaccurate. They are constantly revised to reflect the same conclusion, but never actually predict what ACTUALLY happens in the real world. There was initially slightly more warming than the previous historical models predicted, but by 1991 warming was back to the historical trend line, and there has actually been no significant warming since 1994-1998 depending on exactly which dataset you look at.

Human outputs from all of industry, vehicles etc… Make up less than 1% of total atmospheric CO2… actually between .3 and .4%. The VAST majority of CO2 comes from forests, oceans, animals, and soil (and the bacteria contained therein). They also absorb CO2 in the natural CO2 cycle.

If the historical, non catastrophic models prove correct, and they have so far, there will be between less than 1 and just over 2 degrees centigrade warming in the next 100 years. This is not catastrophic, and is consistent with warming/cooling cycles throughout history.

If all human output of carbon dioxide and other theorized elements of climate change stopped right now, today… That number wouldn’t change at all, or at most very little. Within the margin of error.

Once you take the catastrophic sensitivity to a tiny change out of the model, many other factors become far greater “forcings”, particularly the suns variability (relating to sunspot cycles).

If the catastrophic models are correct, either we already have, or we soon will, pass the point of no return. We would not only have to completely stop emitting CO2 entirely, but we would have to take large amounts of it out of the environment.

No matter what, the developing world isn’t going to stop burning wood, and coal, and growing and modernizing and using as much hydrocarbons as they can. They don’t give a damn what european liberals think, they just want to cook their dinners and have lights at night.

No matter what, China and India aren’t going to stop being 60+% of all CO2 emissions from human sources (that’s according to the environmentalist group, the earth policy institute. UN numbers say it’s more like 30-40%), because if they did they’d all be plunged into even greater poverty and likely starve to death.

What it comes down to is this:

If the catastrophic models are correct, it’s too late to do anything about it anyway.

Even if every western nation utterly stopped producing ANY output which contributed to climate change, it wouldn’t make any difference whatsoever.

If the catastrophic theory is wrong, and everything point to it being so, then we would be spending trillions of dollars, destroying economies, ruining millions or billions of peoples lives etc… All for little or nothing.

There are real, actual, proven problems that are far more likely to be important, and that we can actually do something about, that are much better ways to spend our time and money.

Ok… so why do so many people support the idea… particularly so many scientists?

The same reason anyone does anything… because it aligns with their perceived incentives, beliefs, worldview, narrative, and identity.

To wit…

Funding

Social signaling an ingroup identification

Politics

Power and control (climate change legislation is all about taking power and control from one group, and giving it to another)

Ideology and alignment with world view

The precautionary principle

Anti-capitalism

Funding

Because if they don’t, they don’t get jobs, their papers don’t get published, they don’t get university positions etc…

Because they know that it’s not as bad as the press makes it out to be, but that making it super duper scary is the only way to make the morons out there pay attention and actually make some of the good positive changes that need to happen (like more energy efficient technology, and more research into alternative energy)

Because the entire world has lined up into teams, not just about climate change, but about ALL social, cultural, and scientific issues… Evolution, homosexuality, everything else about the environment etc… and one team has decided to label themselves “progressive” and “liberal” and “pro science” and the other team “anti science”, and nobody wants to be “regressive” and “anti-science”.

Did I mention funding? There is no funding in saying “things are going to be about like they always have been, with some small changes as expected, and maybe a very small degree of increased change… it will have some moderate impacts”. That’s boring, and it gets ignored, and no-one gets any funding, and you can’t do additional research on it. No-one is paying for research into squirrel populations and how “1 degree per century of climate change will impact them).

Yes… I repeated myself, in several different ways there… That was intentional.

The Broken Record

Catastrophists have a record, of being broken records… and being mostly or entirely wrong.

From 1974 until 1985 or thereabouts, many of the exact same scientists, politicians, pundits, and environmentalists who today are saying are going to warm our way into a combination of ice age, deserts, and typhoons everywhere… were saying the exact opposite.

At the time, their theories and models said that we were going to precipitate our own ice age, blocking out the sun, and that crops would fail and we would starve to death.

The fact is, we’ve heard over and over again for decades that if we don’t do exactly what this one particular group wants us to do about any particular issue within 5, 10, 20 years etc… that we’re all gonna die, the world is gonna end, everything will turn to dust, there will be no birds, no trees…

Anyone remember when acid rain was going to kill us all?

Yes, in part, it’s because we did respond to the concerns of the environmentalists, regulations were changed somewhat, technology got better, we polluted less and cleaned up more. These are all good things.

But mostly it was because they were dramatically overstating both the problems, and the solutions; either because they actually believed it, or for political reasons…

Seems to me, mostly for political reasons.

Mostly we haven’t done what they asked.

The world didn’t end.

We didn’t all die.

Of course, that doesn’t mean they aren’t right this time…

…One of these times they just might be… or at least they might be more right than wrong…

…it just means that we should really be very careful, and very skeptical, about what they say, what we believe, and what we do about it.

Oh and one more thing…

There is one final, and almost universal test of the validity of someones claim that “everything has to change”.

It can’t prove that a claim is true… but it can nearly always prove a false claim to be false, or at least greatly exaggerated.

Simplified, it’s called the “Act as If” test.

Does the person making the claim, act as they would if the claim were true, and as urgent as they say?

Is it conclusive? No… but it’s a pretty strong indicator.

Do those who say they believe in truly catastrophic anthropogenic global warming pass this test?

Do they actually act as they would, if they actually believed their predictions.

Basically what that means, is that I believe, all things being equal, responsible adults should be able to do whatever the hell they want to do, so long as nobody’s getting hurt, who isn’t paying extra

There’s not a human being alive who doesn’t know the dollar is falling. Everyone over 25 has stories of what prices were like, way back when (and younger people have heard them). I remember when gasoline was 60 cents a gallon, and my mom remembers when it was 20 cents.

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen acknowledges the official objective to push the dollar down by 2 percent per year. This intention is behind the Fed’s ill-conceived loose money policy.

It’s important to measure each drop. This is not just to keep a scorecard on the Fed, but because a change in the dollar skews historical comparisons and distorts business decisions, like giving increases to workers and pensioners….

Read the whole piece, and then come back…

The thesis statement of the piece is correct, in that prices provide a misleading indicator of currency valuation (and that our weak dollar policy, as pursued by every administration since Bush 1 to some degree or another, is fundamentally wrong and destructive for that matter).

Unfortunately the author suggests that simply using a different price denomination and comparison (to gold) is a less misleading indicator… In this, he’s absolutely incorrect.

What you really want to compare is purchasing power parity (PPP) as measured by equivalent standard of living, expressed as a dollar cost in constant dollars normalized to average labor hour wage or compensation.

i.e. this item costs 5 minutes of average labor, this costs 8 hours, this costs 20 years; the cost to maintain this equivalent normalized standard of living across an aggregate population is 1940 hours of median labor wage etc… etc…

Note, this is NOT an expression of the fallacious labor theory of value, it is an explicit measure of purchasing power parity as actual cost, INCLUDING opportunity cost (in terms of time), not currency denomination.

The critical function isn’t price, and it isn’t wage… it’s cost, in this case expressed as a cost to value ratio as a normalized dollar (to make it easy to relate to wages and prices).

Cost is not price; it’s a totalized measure of inputs including resources, time, and opportunity.

Basically what that means, is that I believe, all things being equal, responsible adults should be able to do whatever the hell they want to do, so long as nobody’s getting hurt, who isn’t paying extra